Veteran VR studio nDreams has made several shooters with innovative mechanics over the years. So when the studio announced VENDETTA FOREVER, we knew we’d want to give it a try, so we jumped into the Quest demo that’s available to all starting today.
Vendetta Forever is an arcade shooter through and through. Though it has the ‘auto-aim’ vibes and bullet trails of Pistol Whip and the slow motion bullet dodging of SUPERHOT VR (and shares aesthetics of both), Vendetta Forever is far from being a clone. In true nDreams style, it brings something new and interesting to the table: a movement mechanic where you can teleport to any gun you can see, whether sitting on the ground or still falling from a dispatched enemy’s hands.
And this isn’t just an occasional thing, the game is built around your ability to rapidly move from one gun to the next, not just to get around, but to avoid all the bullets that were headed right for your face. And because there are almost always bullets headed for your face, rapidly the game sets a frenetic pace of jumping from gun to gun.
Even on the base ‘Normal’ setting, you’ll almost certainly find yourself dying a few times when you start a new level. But the fun part is knowing what to expect the next time around… after a few tries you’ll be moving with the speed of a superhero and shooting like a sharpshooter that can see the future.
Though this pace can definitely make you feel like a badass superhero, it never really lets up. If you aren’t moving, you’re dead. That means not only jumping from gun-to-gun, but also physically moving your body to dodge incoming bullets, similar to Pistol Whip.
There was at least one part in my hands-on with the game where things slowed down for a minute—I was shooting a big machine gun out of a helicopter—which was a nice change of pace, but it only lasted briefly. I hope the game will include more moments like this to break up the pace. I also wouldn’t mind an outright ‘freeze’ ability to freeze the action and give myself a few seconds to think about what my next move should be. Perhaps this would be an ability with a long cooldown to give players that breather moment when they need it, but not reduce the challenge too greatly.
Levels in the game are largely deterministic. The same enemy will round the same corner at the same moment. As mentioned, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it turns you into a future-seeing gun-god. But levels also have some alternative paths which you can take depending upon which gun you decide to teleport to.
Ultimately this didn’t change very much about the level, but it might add a little replayability for those aiming for high scores on the leaderboards. Hunting for new and potentially faster paths through a level could be an interesting aspect of the game.
The levels that I played in Vendetta Forever are, so far, quite short. If you know the path they might take you 30-60 seconds to complete. But those first few times dying while exploring the level expands that time a bit. But if you aren’t interested in optimizing your score or completion time, you’ll be blasting through levels pretty quickly, so it remains to be seen if nDreams can create enough to feel like there’s really some meat to the experience for those not interested in improving their leaderboard rank.
And a final note that didn’t really fit anywhere else… I’m fine with the game’s stylized look, but was very surprised at the significant amount of aliasing. Given the low-poly aesthetic, this really feels like a game that should be running at maximum resolution and native 90Hz or 120Hz on a Quest 3. It’s possible the build I played has yet to be optimized for Quest 3, or perhaps a significant optimization pass will land before the game launches.
I’m sold on the underlying mechanics of Vendetta Forever. Moving by teleporting from one gun to the next, combined with some generous auto-aim to make you feel like you’ve got action-movie aim, definitely works.
The success of Vendetta Forever is likely to hinge on the quality of the levels if there’s enough (and enough variety) among them to keep the game interesting. I’m hopeful they can pull it off, though level and enemy variety have been a weak point for nDreams games in the past.
The demo for Vendetta Forever on Quest is available today, and the game will launch on Quest 2, Quest Pro, Quest 3, and PSVR 2 this October.
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